IT 2: The Reckoning
by Emily Eccentric
Summary: Something's wrong in Derry... Something's wrong with Bill Denbrough... What could IT possibly be... Based on the book, not the movie.
1. Chapter 1: Almost Done?

Bill Denbrough awoke with a scream.

The noise was loud enough to wake up Audra, too, who had been sleeping without disturbance next to him on the bed. She turned on the lamp on the small table beside her. Dim light flooded the room, illuminating Bill's face, which was stark white and haggard. His eyes burned a feverishly vivid blue as he searched the room, looking for something unknown to her and, by the desperate look on his face, the majority of the sane world. Finally, reality seemed to catch up with him. He closed his eyes and slid against the headboard as if exhausted.

"Is everything alright?" Audra asked. Bill looked over at her, startled, aware for the first time that she was even there.

"Nothing. Just another nightmare." It sounded more like he was trying to assure himself than comfort her.

"Another nightmare," Audra repeated wearily. "I know you're not going to want to hear this, Bill, but I'll be glad when that movie is finally finished. I think it's been exhausting you."

"That must be it," Bill said, without much conviction.

"Well, you need to stop worrying yourself over it. With such a brilliant director, I'm sure it will be a blockbuster." She leaned forward and kissed him gently. Bill favored her with an "awe-shucks" grin, but traces of fear were still apparent in his eyes.

"It's nothing special."

"Don't be humble," Audra replied. "You put your heart and soul into that script. Don't think I didn't notice. You were so moody, and up at all hours of the night..."

Bill's smile faded considerably. Except you don't remember that, do you, Billy boy? No, he didn't. In fact, the six months he spent writing the script was a blank black gap, and the year-and-a-half of directing and filming was even worse. "I think I'll be glad when it's over, too."


	2. Chapter 2: Only Begun

"That's the third murder this month," Sergeant Olliver said. Across the street, the coroner pulled a white sheet over the small form on the gurney. One pigtail hung pathetically over the metal edge of the cart, like a doll's braid of yarn.

Sergeant Olliver had seen a lot of things in his fifty-seven years, all of which were spent exclusively in Derry. But he'd never seen anything like this. When they had found Jessica Camson's lifeless body, she had been facedown in the plugged-up sink of their modest kitchen, still dressed in play clothes smudged with mud from the fresh rain that had been falling outside. She was kneeling on a stepstool with her arms flung around the sink in a gesture of embrace. Olliver had seen a glimpse of her face as they carried her out toward the ambulance. There was fear in those eyes. Fear frozen so deep down that even death couldn't fade it out.

"Not murder," Officer Green said. Green was a lanky young man easily twice Olliver's height, although he was less than half his age. He chewed incessantly on a wad of cinnamon gum and had the coolly critical eyes of someone who thought he was a lot more intelligent than he actually was. Together, the two of them looked like a comedy duo from an old movie. The only thing shattering the illusion was the dead child wrapped up in a sheet on the gurney less than ten feet away. "Suicide."

"You want me to believe a five-year-old drowned himself in a stopped-up bathroom sink?"

"That's what the coroner says. All the signs match up. The sink seemed to have been stopped up deliberately and there was no struggle..." Green sighed and gave a weary chomp on his ever-present glob of cinnamon gum. Then, sounding more world-weary than he had a right to, "Kids do crazy things this day and age."

"Oh, yeah? And where does this little piece of evidence fit into your philosophy, Green?" Olliver said. He held up a balloon-animal dog that glinted translucent orange in the sleepy afternoon sunlight. It had been found bobbing alongside Jessica's drowned corpse.


	3. Chapter 3: Long Night

Freddie Firestone had been wrong. Bill wasn't finished in Hollywood...not just yet.

The Nameless Terror had been called the most promising horror script in the past thirty years. Of course, studios were skeptical. The Denbrough name was stamped on a lot of less-than-Oscar-worthy movies...klunkers, to be blunt. And his little disappearing act last year had certainly raised some eyebrows in Tinsel town. However, the sheer quality of the script shone out through all the bad press, luminous and impossible to ignore. Kind of like

(the deadlights)

Bill old boy had cast some kind of magic spell over it. Filming started almost immediately. A-list actors appeared like angels out of nowhere and practically begged Bill to be part of the project. Billions of dollars were spent on special effects and sets. Producers flocked to see him. If they had been any less subtle, Bill had told Audra after one bewilderingly prosperous day of filmmaking, they would have been waving rolls of hundred-dollar bills in his face.

Now, as he snuck barefoot down to his study, he wondered what all those producers would think if they knew he barely remembered writing a single word of the script they were shelling out for. And what the actors would think if they knew their tireless director went home each night and promptly forgot everything that had happened since they started filming.

Bill's study was a comfortable room surrounded by bookshelves with a grandiose oaken desk in the center. The desk had cost a good $900, but the computer perched on top of it had cost even more. Bill had always written by hand, but Audra had insisted on buying him the most ridiculously expensive word processor on the market. Now Bill was addicted to the thing-- this amazing machine which would have seemed like science fiction in his impossibly distant fifties childhood.

Funny how much he was thinking of that lately.

Bill walked right past the computer, which regarded him with the blind darkness of its off-screen. He instead made a beeline for a battered metal file cabinet that was sitting in the corner. He opened the bottom drawer with a startlingly loud clank and shuffled through the files within. Bill had a bizarre need...call it superstition, call it psychosis, call it compulsion...to have a hard copy of everything he ever wrote, be it novel, script, or short story. Audra had once joked that he had a copy of every grocery list he had ever penned somewhere in that drawer.

His hand closed around a manila file. It looked neat and inoffensive. However, when he turned it upside-down, just like the guts of Snowden exploding out of his flak jacket in Catch-22, all the file's dark secrets spilled out. They gathered on the desk and floor in random drifts. The room was totally dark except for the anemic green light of one digital clock on the bookshelf, and in this dim light, sans glasses, Bill was somehow able to make out every word he had supposedly written.

Time passed with sluggish unreality. He might have spent hours huddled on the floor, reading each page with the steady concentration of a determined maniac. However, to his own increasingly shock-numb mind, it seemed to take years. Years moving backwards.


	4. Chapter 4: Memory Loss

Bill sat in the hall windowsill. The weak November sunlight glimmered in the dead rosebushes that brushed against the glass pane. From where he sat he could see the moving truck in the driveway, silent and unmoving, waiting patiently to take him from Derry for what he thought was forever.

Finally, he was going to be free.

Sure, he was going to miss all his friends (Eddie? Mike? Ben? Their names were fading quickly now and danced out of his memory like dust motes). But they seemed oddly immaterial now-- they belonged to a childhood that had been lived by someone else, not him. Bill was twelve now and the memories of the past two years now seemed like a dim blur. All except the lingering hurt that he had experienced at the hands of Henry Bowers and his two friends. And somewhere in his heart, even darker and more painful, was another ache...like a hole in his brain. Something missing. Something irreplaceable.

"Bill? I forgot a box of preserves down in the basement; will you go get it for me?" Bill's mother's voice said. His mother, too, seemed like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders when Bill's father informed them he had gotten a new job in Bangor. Maybe she, too, had that sense of hovering dread every time she walked through the streets of Derry. Now that dread would be gone forever.

"S-sure thing," Bill replied. Bill's stutter had lightened considerably over the past few months. Once they moved to Bangor, it would be gone completely. Neither of his parents would remember that he had suffered under its clutches for the better part of eleven years, and Bill wouldn't either.

The house was empty except for cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. It seemed strange walking through it now. He felt like a burglar sneaking into a stranger's home. Bill opened the door to the basement steps and stared down into the darkness below for a few dizzying seconds before fumbling for the light switch. There was a spat of orange sparks, but the light bulb was clearly dead. However, there was enough sunlight shining from the open door to see clearly, so Bill shrugged and headed down the steps.

Walking into the basement was like walking into a different world. The warm cheeriness of the house above him dwindled away, leaving the rotten chill of the dark basement and its spidery mysteries an inescapable reality. The light reflected off a small tin of Turtle Wax on the shelves lining the stairs like a winking eye-- See you again, kiddo. See you real soon.

Bill shuddered almost without knowing why and turned the tin around so the blank side faced him instead.

His eyes locked on a cardboard box labeled PRESERVES in black marker. He had the sudden desire to just leave the stupid box and run like hell, leaving the basement behind him forever. He willed himself to keep marching forward toward the box as if it were some kind of holy grail. Just get the box and get out of here. Hit the road so hard it hits back. Get back, Jack, don't come back.

Just as he stepped out of the rectangle of pale light shining from the open doorway, a white-gloved hand curled around his ankle.

"Bet you thought you killed me, huh? Well, surprise, Billy-old-boy. I'm thinking of sticking around. I'm thinking of sticking around a LOOONGGG TIME."

Bill's eyes flickered in the direction of the voice and he immediately regretted it. Pennywise grinned back at him from under an empty wooden shelf. Above that smile of yellow fangs were eyes that had been gouged out, leaving bloody voids. Its white greasepaint was cracked and old and smudged away in several places to reveal puckered, rotting gray skin. Past those jagged teeth and the cankerous black horror of the thing's mouth there glimmered a pestilential white light...a light that made the comfortable fog of Bill's obscured memories burn away, if only for a moment.

"You're nuh-nuh-not h-here," Bill whispered, barely audible.

"Oh, I'm always here," Pennywise rasped through his lips, painted gore-red. "Make sure to drop by and say hullo when you come back, Bill. And you'll come back. You'll AALLLL come back. It's gonna be one humdinger of a party! It's gonna be a GRAND OLD TIME!"

Bill let out a strangled scream and wrenched his ankle from Pennywise's grasp. He bolted for the stairs, the insane chuckling of the demonic clown still echoing after him even as he escaped into the well-lit hall and slammed the door behind him. Later he would tell his mother that he hadn't been able to find the box of preserves. And by the time the moving truck was halfway out of Derry with their lives inside it, Bill didn't remember what had happened in the basement at all.


	5. Chapter 5: Fading Back

Bill set down the last page of the script slowly with one trembling hand. There were only three words printed on it: FADE TO BLACK.

The ticking of the clock on the wall brought him out of his reverie. It read four AM, meaning that he had spent the entire night shuffling through the pages of the damned script. Audra would be worried, and understandably so. He was acting like a lunatic.

Bill got to his feet somewhat unsteadily and immediately had to hold his head in his hands to keep from falling. An agonizing headache thudded in his skull. No wonder, seeing as how he had read the entire night sans glasses.

Well, at least there's a rationalization for that, huh? Stan would be proud, if he weren't six feet under and worm food already. But what about the fact that you were able to read anything without your glasses? What about that, Billy-old-boy?

He closed his eyes tightly, willing the voice to shut up. Eventually, it did. But the doubts it raised didn't.

Bill took one final look at the pages, which were spilled across the floor like the victims of some strange massacre of type and ink. Then he bolted for his room. His heart pounded with fear and exhaustion. He staggered through the doorway, only to see Audra sleeping peacefully and feel another painful stab of remembrance. She had seen It too. She had been subjected to Its horror more than Bill himself had ever had to experience.

What would happen to her now that It seemed to be preying on his memories? Would she, too, have to recall the hideous feeling of being submerged in the pestilential glow of the deadlights?

(that's the kind of thing that could drive a person insane)

Bill's mind suddenly filled with the image of Audra's face after he had rescued her from the web in the Spider's lair. Without the gossamer gauze of the spider-strands, he had been able to see her expression for what it really was...the terrifying vacancy, the cruel stark reality of her empty eyes. That look had almost driven him crazy. He could only imagine in his blackest thoughts what it had been like for her.

A small choked scream escaped his mouth. Audra woke up suddenly, startled.

"Bill? Bill, what...?"

But Bill had already collapsed on the bed. Although he was still awake even as Audra's demands to know what was going on reached a hysterical frequency, he fell asleep without answering. He didn't trust himself to speak.


	6. Chapter 6: Maine?

The next day Bill and Audra hardly spoke to each other. After nearly fifteen years together, Audra knew Bill's tendency to moody secretiveness when he was working on a project. Today, the day of the premiere her husband had been planning for almost two years, she expected him to be a little off-kilter in his emotions.

But last night had scared her. That night Bill had mumbled more than ever in his sleep, so much that she herself had been unable to rest. She could make out only snatches of what he was saying...something about spiders, desperate apologies to someone named Georgie, and an almost unearthly screaming about something unknown

(?deadlights?)

Whatever was disturbing Bill's sleep, it was bothering her as well. Bothering her very much.

Bill stood in the kitchen, dressed in a somber, almost funereal black suit. His blue eyes looked utterly lost behind the lenses of his spectacles. Even the slight touch of her hand on his arm made him jump noticeably. Pre-show nerves were one thing, but the blanched paleness of Bill's face was beginning to frighten her.

"What on earth are you so worried about? You seemed so confident just a few days ago."

"N-nothing."

The fear in his voice found its reflection in Audra's eyes. "Bill?"

Bill pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, as though physically trying to hold his mind together. "Do you...do you remember when I went to Maine?"

"Maine? Bill, you have to tell me what's going on. I don't think I can take much more of this." She placed both of her hands on his shoulders, trying to get him to look her in the eye. She might as well have tried to comfort a statue. "Please, let me know what's wrong."

"It was only last year. You must remember something," Bill replied in that same stony, distant voice.

"You haven't been to Maine in years," Audra said, shaking her head in bewilderment. How could he be talking about this out-of-the-blue nonsense? It was the night of the premiere, the one Bill had been so obsessed with making perfect. And now he was talking about imagined jaunts to Maine. It didn't make any sense.

Then again, lots of things hadn't been making sense to Audra lately. Like the fact that when she actually thought back on the past year, something it had never occurred for her to do, the images there were dark and blurred. The only thing she could remember concretely was a dim and persistent feeling of dread...the dread of knowing what was lurking behind the haze of her forgetfulness.

Bill must have noticed the uncertainty in her voice. He leaned forward and gently took her lips in his. She returned the kiss.

"After tonight," Bill murmured in her ear. "After tonight, I promise I'll tell you every thing I know."


	7. Chapter 7: Doppelganger Land

The premiere was unusual, to say the least.

The media coverage of the event had been hushed and secretive, which of course only made the general public ravenous for more information. Whether Bill Denbrough had planned it this way or not was a mystery. The event was held in an abandoned warehouse (which had been converted into a theater by the ever-vigilant and ever-bewildered production crew) on the outskirts of Hampstead Heath, under the cloak of nightfall. Actors and celebrities arrived in limousines like half-real creatures from the fog, wandering into the shadowy dream world of Denbrough's design.

The warehouse had been converted to look like the lair of the Spider in The Nameless Evil. Tattered cobwebs were strewn over the doorway and strung over the ceiling of the interior, hanging in pendulous, eerie curtains. Bones (plastic, of course, but remarkable imitations) stabbed up through the ground in a wasteland of jagged shapes. The red carpet cut a swath through the graveyard of skeletons. Squinting, one could almost imagine that the carpet was really a river of blood, wickedly crimson.

However, the most impressive effect was in the antechamber, the large, high-ceilinged room with almost wall-sized doors on the far wall that led into the converted theater. Through the lacy drifts of cobwebs, an imitation egg sac, the size of a small car, hung from the ceiling. An elaborate system of floodlights, timers, and fog machines gave the impression of pulsing, unearthly light coming from deep within it.

Bill felt transfixed by this fake plastic prop as he walked down the red carpet. In fact, he could barely take his eyes off of it. It stirred up faded memories in the back of his head as if kicking up dirt in some mental cemetery, revealing coffins underneath, cradling the corpses of his past.

"Something wrong?" somebody said from beside him.

Bill jumped. "No, nothing. I'm fine." The response came out robot-automatic, smooth, practiced, reassuring. Then the illusion of calm was broken when he realized who he was talking to.

It was himself. Sure, there were differences, but they were fleeting and superficial. First, the man in front of him was about fifteen years younger. He also carried a brilliant movie-star confidence that Bill, even at his most charismatic, had never possessed. But the russet hair, the bright blue eyes, even the quietly handsome angles of the face...these were all mirror images.

He realized that this was the actor who was playing him. Not him, exactly, but an obvious facsimile of himself-- a surrogate Bill Denbrough reliving the real Bill's horrific experiences in an artificial version of Derry. He knew without scanning the crowd that somewhere there was a false Eddie, a Bev, a Stan...and even, somewhere in the sea of faces, was someone made up in white greasepaint, acting the part of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. He shuddered involuntarily.

"Hey, keep it together. Milton's looking for you." Fake-Bill looked hurt, and a little puzzled. Even his voice sounded the same as Bill's.

"Milton?" Bill asked hoarsely.

"Your agent, remember?" Fake-Bill's confusion grew more pronounced. "And you used to chew me out for missing a line."

"Sorry," Bill said nonsensically, beginning to shamble towards the doors leading into the theater. "Thanks."

"Guh-guh-guh-go g-g-get 'em, Big Buh-Buh-Bill," Fake-Bill called after him. His stutter was so realistically similar to the real Bill's former way of speaking that it was like hearing a radio transmission from across time. Bill felt another chilling pang of fear as yet another part of his past slammed into his thoughts with all the subtlety of a Mack truck.

The theater was mostly quiet. Only a few people were seated in the audience. At the front of the chamber was a gigantic movie screen-- even bigger than the one at Mann's theater, although some film quality had been compensated for the opportunity to hold the premiere at such an eerie location. The screen was partially hidden by a black velvet curtain that was draped nearly to the floor in shining, sable-dark layers.

A small man in wire-rimmed spectacles jogged up to Bill, looking harried and out-of-breath.

"Where have you been? You're due to present the opening speech in ten minutes," he hissed urgently. Bill guessed this was the infamous Milton. His rabbit-y face looked un-intimidating, but his eyes burned fire.

"Just lost track of time," Bill said, managing an extremely unconvincing smile.

"Follow me," Milton said. He began to pull Bill along with a strength he hadn't expected the little man to possess.


	8. Chapter 8: Speaches and Spectators

A small back stage area had been set up behind the movie screen, mostly as a place for the technical crew to set up their emergency equipment. The severe modernity of the beeping, flashing equipment shattered the illusion of the ethereal spider's nest outside, letting Bill clear his head enough to get his notes together.

But then again, it was all too easy to imagine a cartoon-ish, white gloved hand opening the curtain and two silver-dollar eyes glinting back at him from the darkness. A goofy red nose. A grin of yellow, pointed teeth.

"Let's _go_, Bill! This is your big show! Your starring role!" Milton wheedled.

"Right," Bill managed. He forced himself to walk onstage.

The sheer number of people in the audience was intimidating and overwhelming. Bill's past movies had been much more small-time and mainly presented at film festivals where the number of viewers was limited. Now, with a sea of expectant eyes locked on him, he was sure to flounder hopelessly. The fact that he barely remembered the film he was supposed to have directed wasn't helping matters.

Instead, Bill was surprised with the confident ease from which he was able to read the speech. His voice sounded cadenced, smooth, charming. People in the audience laughed at his joked and nodded sympathetically at his anecdotes. Soon he was hardly looking at the note cards. Words sprang into his head as easily as type on paper when he was caught up in authority inspiration.

Everything was going just fine until he noticed the clown in the audience.

"Howya doin', Billy-boy?" The clown- Pennywise; he knew in his heart, though his brain hoped desperately that this was all some vivid hallucination- let out a manic bray of laughter. A bucket of popcorn was balanced on the knees of Pennywise's pantaloons, striped carnival-bright. Through some horrified compulsion of observation, he noticed that roaches and fat black flies crawled and chilled and buzzed over the butter-yellow puffs.

"Well, go on ahead, Buh- Buh- Buh- Bill. They're all waiting for ya," Pennywise cackled.

"And an amazing cast of actors…" Bill said in a faint, shaking voice.

"Hey, Bill," a voice whispered conspiratorially from the seat in the audience that Pennywise had been sitting in. "Remember me?"

Bill felt his gaze being dragged down to the audience against his will. He saw Eddie sitting there- Eddie who had been blankly absent from his memory mere days after his death. One arm was draped over the pop corn bucket. Roaches wriggled through his frog-belly-white fingers. The other arm was just a crude stump of meat and splintered bone dripping congealed black gore down the front of his faded sport-coat. His timid face was curled into a grotesque, malevolent grim he would have never worn in life.

"I remember _you_, Bill," Eddie half-choked, half-gurgled- the sound of words being spat from a long dead pair of lungs. "And you know, I've had a long time to think things over while I've been down here. You know what I found out? It's all your fault. Yessiree, Bill, you're the grand prizewinner in the 'Who Killed Eddie Kaspbrak Competition!' Step on up, Bill. We'll have a _GRAND OLD TIME!_"

"No…" Bill whispered, holding onto the podium for support like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. "Eddie, please…"

People in the audience were stirring uncomfortably, but Bill didn't notice. His gaze was frozen on the chair, where his brother George was seated. His face was so bloated and decayed as to be barely recognizable, but it was him, friends and neighbors, yessiree, IT was Georgie.

"What's behind door number one, Billy?" Georgie shrieked in a voice that was at once childish and piping, yet filled with an ageless malice. "Who's that floating facedown in the canal? Is it little Doris Cochocan? Is it Rebecca Hunlon? Is it _me_? No, it's you, Bill! You're gonna find out how we all floooaaat down here!"

Georgie cackled, a brainless, unhinged insane expression of glee. He laughed so hard that popcorn flew into the air, send glittering black beetles flying. One huge cockroach, the size of a mouse, landed dead center on Bill's note card and stared up at him with tiny, ink-black eyes.

"Tell all your friends, Bill! Tell them there's room for everyone! You'll all get a chance to floooaaat!"

Again, Georgie dragged out that syllable in a wheedle-y, rattling, waterlogged screech. Another sound joined it, and Bill realized it was the sound of his own voice screaming. A hand clamped on his shoulder. Bill whirled around fully expecting to see Pennywise the Clown, with his face greasy with oil paint and his red mouth stretched in the cannibal grin.

What he saw was Milton, visibly quivering with fear and humiliation. It was then that Bill saw the looks of horrified awkwardness- the look of someone who had just been told an immensely inappropriate joke and was unsure how to react- plastered on the faces of the patrons in the audience.

"Suh- suh- sorry," Bill choked out. He shoved the note cards into Milton's fumbling hands. "I r- r- r- really cuh- han't stay."

And leaving the bewildered Milton standing stock-still on the stage, still holding his note cards, Bill bolted from the stage.


End file.
